...sheik's approval, al-Jazeera became the first media company in the region not subject to censorship.
The Qatar Foundation was founded in 1995 under the direction of Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned, Sheikh Hamad's wife. The foundation, which receives funds from the national oil companies, began to contact universities in 1999.
As benefactors go, Sheikha Mozah remains quite active. She visits the Qatar Science and Technology Park often and attends meetings on various campuses to discuss joint education and other collaborative projects.
Sheikha Mozah's interest, some believe, also stems from her desire to see more local women enter the work force, and Qatari women are responding by applying in large numbers. At Texas A&M, about 35 percent of the engineering students are women, far higher than most other engineering schools elsewhere in the world.
"Men coming out of the high school system know they will be taken care of by the bounty of the state. But you get the sense that women have more to prove, especially if they want to have their own lives," Carnegie Mellon's Reilly said. "As long as they are in school, they are not under pressure to get married. And when you finally do get married you have some leverage."
Initially, the Qatar Foundation tried to recruit a single university to build a complete campus in the country. When those plans failed, it sought relationships with several institutions, each of which would replicate a couple of departments from the home campus.
Carnegie Mellon offers degrees in computer science and business, for example, while Texas A&M offers chemical, electrical, mechanical and petroleum engineering. Cornell has a medical school and a two-year pre-med undergraduate course. Virginia Commonwealth offers arts courses.
The departments are smaller than their US counterparts, but growing. Weill Cornell Medical School had 16 students in the first class and 18 in the second. In a few years, the number is expected to grow to about 33. Texas A&M has 60 per class but will increase that number.
Early on, the Qatar Foundation and the government agreed not to interfere with academic policies or admissions, two key requirements for participating universities.
"We were given every conceivable assurance that we would be able to function the same way we do in New York, but there were many sceptics," said Daniel Alonso, dean of Weill Cornell at Qatar. "The proof of the pudding in the end is who is giving the medical degree. It will be a Cornell University medical degree. If you do that, you are risking reputation. You are risking everything."
Admissions decisions at Cornell are handled by the same committee that performs the task for the main campus in New York. Students rejected in New York cannot reapply in Qatar.
At one of the undergraduate...
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